I hope you enjoy the new content (well, most of it is old, but you get the idea). The Collegian required me to write extremely short articles most of the time, so you'll probably find some of them rather insubstantial, but I can also be more verbose than I need to be sometimes, so maybe it's a positive thing.

Post number 51.

UPDATE: The Columns Section no longer exists. Use the dropdown of blog tags instead.

It's great to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but it's more important for the average young man or woman to know how to handle money, network, and communicate. Here I argue that financial management should be part of the mostly-pointless capstone courses CSU requires students to take.

The year I graduated from CSU, seven sexual assaults were reported on campus in the first six weeks of the fall semester. That's completely unacceptable on so many levels I'm not even sure where to start—that the campus is so unsafe, that law enforcement in the area was so slow to do anything about it, that our society in general allows for this type of behavior, the list goes on.

By far the biggest problem in this situation was that women were being attacked on campus and no one was listening. But worsening the situation further was how some of the men were reacting, getting anxious that they were being labeled as stalkers or assumed to be bad people because they were men.

Obviously I'm not in favor of people generalizing that all men are sex predators or that all women are victims. But my article here is about how men (specifically the moderator of CSU Confessions at the time) were so caught up in being defensive that they forgot about how women on campus were being assaulted and that that's a way bigger problem than a woman giving them a weird look once. I kind of doubt that women will think you're creepy if you don't act like a creep, fellas.

I think part of the reason people struggle to become wealthy and successful (however they may define those things) is that they hear doggerel like "money is the root of all evil" and assume there's something wrong with striving for success. I'm not sure this is quite as black-and-white as the message I offer up in this article, where I effectively argue that the super-wealthy keep the poor down on purpose. But I think there's at least a grain of truth to that. After all, the only way for some to rise is for others to fall.

There's this constant sense in modern society that we must always be busy, must always be working. We used to be able to bear moments of silence and peace. Now, we fill those moments with social media scrolling and email refreshing. I was reading a lot about minimalism in college, so I wrote this article on the subject of learning to be at peace with yourself and taking the time to meditate. I'm not very good at it myself, even to this day, but it's worth trying if you're feeling stressed or overworked.